Phillauri Movie Review

Phillauri is a supernatural comedy where a man gets stuck with a friendly spirit after he is made to marry a tree. Here is our Phillauri movie review.

Phillauri Cast: Anushka Sharma, Diljit Dosanjh, Suraj Sharma, Mehreen Pirzada

Phillauri Direction: Anshai Lal

Phillauri Rating:  (1.5/5)

When the friendly spirit Shashi is asked why she is stuck with the soon-to-be-married Kanan, she says, "Pata nahi, main to yahi atki hui hoon." Anshai Lal's 138-minute long Phillauri could speak for itself here.

Once the one-line idea of guy-getting-married-to-spirit has been established, the film hovers around, like Shashi, from one useless scene to another which are neither funny nor interesting nor of any service to whatever goodness the film has.

So, Kaneda-return Punjabi boy Kanan, 26, returns to India to get married. Cue: Boisterous Punjabi family scenes during wedding season. Kanan is played superbly by Life Of Pi actor Suraj Sharma. Kanan beat-boxes when he is asked to sing by his family. Later, he escapes them and goes to the roof to roll a J. When his fiance Anu (a decent Mehreen Pirzada) asks if he is ready for the marriage, he goes "Yo, chill." Phillauri is pretty entertaining and appears promising in these initial scenes till the point Kanan is married to a tree because of being a manglik and Shashi, the spirit enters his life.

Now once this set up has been established, you need solid plot developments to fill the rest of the ninety minutes. This, Phillauri lacks. A premise like this has the potential to deliver a good supernatural comedy a la Beetlejuice or Casper. As such, the usual direction a story like this can take is one where the human(s) and the ghost(s) slowly resolve their innermost crises by being in constant proximity to each other and this is achieved by a series of good, well-written scenes.

Now, Kanan's crisis is that 1. he is unsure of getting married and 2. there is a ghost living with him. Shashi's crisis is that she is stuck with Kanan; her story arc is resolved in the most predictable way at the end and it is strange that this was not made the film's focus from the very beginning. As long as Kanan and Shashi are together on screen, for the most part, Phillauri is interesting. In friendly-ghost films like these, it is the way the human and the ghost play off each other and the weird situations they create is what makes these films worth watching.

Watch Phillauri Tailor

But Kanan-Shashi's parts are punctuated by an elaborate backstory that is just dull and Diljit Dosanjh is a decent performer, sure, but he is not a big enough Khan to make mediocre writing worthwhile. The period-backstory involving Shashi and her lover, played by Diljit, seriously drags the film. Sometimes, the cloying sentimentality of these portions is nauseating and these scenes jut out like a sore thumb in the middle of the fun Kanan-Shashi moments.

Phillauri's concept is good and novel. But the delivery is what North Indians call KLPD. The climactic payoff at the end comes way too easily. It's just lazy writing after a point. If only Shashi emerged in the writer's room before filming and smacked some imagination into her head.